PROPERTY OR GROUND RENT
I n each historical epoch, property has developed differently and under a set of entirely different social relations. thus to define bourgeois property is nothing else than to give an exposition of all the social relations of bourgeois production.
To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence.
M. Proudhon, while seeming to speak of property in general, deals only with landed property , with ground rent .
"The origin of rent, as property, is, so to speak, extra- economic:
it rests in psychological and moral considerations which are only very distantly connected with the production of wealth."(Vol.II, p.265)
So M. Proudhon declares himself incapable of understanding the economic origin of rent and of property. He admits that this incapacity obliges him to resort to psychological and moral considerations, which, indeed, while only distantly connected with the production of wealth, have yet a very close connection with the narrowness of his historical views. M.
Proudhon affirms that there is something mystical and mysterious about the origin of property. Now, to see mystery in the origin of property -- that is, to make a mystery of the relation between production itself and the distribution of the instruments of production -- is not this, to use M. Proudhon's language, a renunciation of all claims to economic science??
M. Proudhon "confines himself to recalling that at the seventh epoch of economic evolution -- credit -- when fiction had caused reality to vanish, and human activity threatened to lose itself in empty space, it had become necessary to bind man more closely to nature. Now, rent was the price of this new contract."(Vol.II, p.269)
L'homme aux quarante ecus [ed: "the Man of Forty Ecus" -- the hero of Voltaire's story of the same name, a modest, hard-working peasant with an annual income of 40 ecus; the following passage is quoted from the story] foresaw a M.
Proudhon of the future:
"Mr. Creator, by your leave: everyone is master in his own world: but you will never make me believe that the one we live in is made of glass."In your world, where credit was a means of losing oneself in empty space, it is very possible that property became necessary in order to bind man to nature. In the world of real production,where landed property always precedes credit, M. Proudhon's horror vacui could not exist.
The existence of rent once admitted, whatever its origin, it becomes a subject of mutually antagonistic negotiations between the farmer and the landed proprietor. What is the ultimate result of these negotiations, in other words, what is the average amount of rent?? This is what M. Proudhon says:
"Ricardo's theory answers this question. In the beginning of society, when man, new to earth, had before him nothing but huge forests, when the earth was vast and when industry was beginning to come to life, rent must have been nil. Land, as yet unformed by labor, was an object of utility;it was not an exchange value, it was common, not social. Little by little, the multiplication of families and the progress of agriculture caused the price of land to make itself felt. Labor came to give the soil its worth;from this, rent came into being. The more fruit a field yielded with the same amount of labor, the higher it was valued; hence the tendency of proprietors was always to arrogate to themselves the whole amount of the fruits of the soil, less the wages of the farm -- that is, less the costs of produc-tion. Thus property followed on the heels of labor to take from it all the product that exceeded the actual expenses. As the proprietor fulfils a mystic duty and represents the community as against the colonus , that farmer is, by the dispensation of Providence, no more than a responsible laborer, who must account to society for all he reaps above his legitimate wage....
"In essence and by destination, then, rent is an instrument of distributive justice, one of the thousand means that the genius of economy employs to attain to equality. It is an immediate land valuation which is carried out contradictor- ily by landowners and farmers, without any possible collu- sion, in a higher interest, and whose ultimate result must be to equalize the possession of the land between the ex- ploiters of the soil and the industrialists....
"It needed no less than this magic of property to snatch from the colonus the surplus of his product which he cannot help regarding as his own and of which he considers himself to be exclusively the author.
Rent, or rather property, has broken down agricultural egoism and created a solidarity that no power, no partition of the land could have brought into being....
"The moral effect of property having been secured, at present what remains to be done is to distribute the rent."[II 270-72]
All this tumult of words may be reduced firstly to this: Ricardo says that the excess of the price of agricultural products over their cost of production, including the ordinary profit and interest on the capital, gives the measure of the rent. M. Proudhon does better. He makes the landowner intervene, like a Deus ex machina , and snatch from the colonus all the surplus of his production over the cost of production. He makes use of the intervention of the landowner [proprietaire] to explain property [propriete], of the intervention of the rent-receiver [rentier] to explain rent [rente].
He answers the problem by formulating the same problem and adding an extra syllable. [Marx makes a play on words: turning "propriete" into "proprietaire"and "rente" into "rentier".]
